Tag: CRM Software

The Role of ConvergeHub to Enhance Your Omnichannel Marketing Efforts

ConvergeHub is a robust customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed to empower businesses with comprehensive tools and features to enhance customer engagement and drive sales.

Omnichannel marketing has been a buzzword long back in the era when “multichannel” marketing was mainstream. However, lately “omnichannel” marketing has emerged as a powerful strategy, allowing businesses to connect with customers across multiple touchpoints. Today, when consumers expect personalized and cohesive interactions, implementing an effective omnichannel marketing approach is essential.

With a host of features at ConvergeHub, your omnichannel marketing efforts take the next leap. Let’s explore how ConvergeHub helps businesses enhance their marketing efforts.

Understanding Omnichannel Marketing: A Brief Overview

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that focuses on providing a unified and cohesive customer experience across all channels and devices. Unlike multichannel marketing, where different channels operate in silos, omnichannel marketing ensures seamless integration and communication between various channels, such as social media, email, mobile apps, and physical stores. This approach allows businesses to deliver consistent messaging and personalized interactions, regardless of the platform or device customers are using.

The Role of ConvergeHub in Omnichannel Marketing

ConvergeHub is a robust customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed to empower businesses with comprehensive tools and features to enhance customer engagement and drive sales.

Here’s how ConvergeHub aids businesses in implementing successful omnichannel marketing strategies:

1. Centralized Customer Data Management

ConvergeHub acts as a centralized hub for managing customer data. It consolidates information from various sources, including social media, emails, website interactions, and more. This unified view of customer data allows businesses to understand customer behavior, preferences, and purchase history, enabling personalized and targeted marketing campaigns.

2. Seamless Integration of Communication Channels

ConvergeHub seamlessly integrates multiple communication channels, such as email, social media, and live chat, into a single platform. This integration ensures that businesses can engage with customers in real-time, respond to inquiries promptly, and maintain consistent communication across different channels.

3. Personalized Marketing Campaigns

As already mentioned ConvergeHub stores customers’ data analyzing customer data stored in ConvergeHub, businesses can create highly targeted and personalized marketing campaigns. The platform’s robust analytics and segmentation tools enable businesses to tailor their messages based on customer demographics, preferences, and purchase history. Personalized marketing efforts significantly enhance customer engagement and increase the likelihood of conversions.

4. Real-time Customer Engagement

ConvergeHub offers real-time tracking and monitoring of customer interactions. Businesses can track customer engagement across various channels and respond promptly to customer inquiries or feedback. This real-time engagement capability ensures that customers receive timely and relevant information, enhancing their overall experience with the brand.

5. Automation and Workflow Management

ConvergeHub automates repetitive tasks and workflows, allowing businesses to focus on strategic aspects of their omnichannel marketing campaigns. Automation ensures that marketing messages are sent at the right time, to the right audience, and through the most effective channels. This not only saves time but also improves the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing efforts.

6. Comprehensive Analytics and Reporting

ConvergeHub provides detailed analytics and reporting features that allow businesses to measure the performance of their omnichannel marketing campaigns. By analyzing key metrics such as customer engagement, conversion rates, and ROI, businesses can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of their strategies. Data-driven decision-making further optimizes future marketing campaigns.

Advantages for the Customers’

Let’s take this example. An online retailer, facing the challenge of delivering personalized shopping experiences to its customers can leverage ConvergeHub, to see tangible improvement in the following segments:

  • 360-Degree Customer View: ConvergeHub aggregated customer data from online interactions, social media, and in-store purchases, providing your company with a comprehensive view of customer preferences and behaviors.
  • Personalized Recommendations: Utilizing ConvergeHub’s segmentation and analytics tools, your online retailing shop can create personalized product recommendations for customers. This led to a 20% increase in average order value and a 15% boost in customer retention.
  • Real-time Customer Support: ConvergeHub’s integrated live chat and social media modules enable your retail shop to provide instant customer support. Response times improved by 30%, leading to higher customer satisfaction and positive reviews.
  • Multi-channel Campaigns: Leveraging ConvergeHub’s marketing automation module helps create targeted email campaigns, social media promotions, and SMS notifications. This coordinated approach results in a 25% increase in online sales within the first quarter of implementation.

Wrapping Up: Elevate Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy with ConvergeHub

In the digital age, delivering consistent and personalized experiences across multiple channels is key to retaining customers and driving revenue. ConvergeHub serves as a valuable ally for businesses aiming to implement effective omnichannel marketing strategies. By centralizing customer data, integrating communication channels, enabling personalized campaigns, facilitating real-time engagement, automating workflows, and offering comprehensive analytics, ConvergeHub empowers businesses to create seamless and engaging customer journeys.

Stay ahead in the competitive landscape by embracing ConvergeHub and revolutionizing your omnichannel marketing approach. Elevate your brand, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive business growth with ConvergeHub – the ultimate solution for mastering the art of omnichannel marketing.

Nailing Success with CRM Software for eCommerce: Features & Examples

For the eCommerce businesses, ever-evolving customer demands are no longer a strange thing. Instead, it’s a strategic imperative in a fiercely competitive environment. It’s obvious that eCommerce success isn’t just about selling products; it’s about weaving perfect kinds of customer experiences, loyalty, and seamless transactions. That’s where the pivotal role of CRM software comes in. A CRM Software for eCommerce is designed keeping the business needs in mind. Plus, the automation features in the software accelerate your sales and marketing efforts to the next level.

A Gartner report reveals that eCommerce companies investing in CRM technology experience a 65% improvement in sales quotas attainment. Studies have shown that marketing automation can boost sales productivity by 14.5% while cutting marketing costs by 12.2%. 

A CRM software for eCommerce automates everything and further takes better control of the collected data and utilizes it to strengthen customer experiences. Whether your objective is to boost sales, acquire more customers and retain those, it’s crucial to enhance team productivity, a CRM tool can help you achieve it effortlessly.

The Role of CRM Software for eCommerce

At its core, CRM software is designed to streamline customer interactions, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive sales growth. For eCommerce businesses, it serves as a multifaceted tool, offering features like customer data management, marketing automation, sales tracking, and customer support ticketing, all integrated into a single platform.

Here’s how the amazing features of ConvergeHub can  help eCommerce business  owners  drive their success.    

Features that Amplify eCommerce Success

Streamlined Customer Data Management

ConvergeHub revolutionizes how eCommerce businesses manage their customer data. By offering a centralized repository for all customer interactions and transactions, it ensures that businesses have a 360-degree view of their clientele. This comprehensive understanding allows for personalized marketing, leading to higher customer satisfaction and increased sales.

Discover a seamless and robust solution for organizing your business contacts in a unified, collaborative database. Easily input contacts manually or import them from external sources using our Import tool and Developer API. Access vital contact details, such as emails, phone numbers, meeting notes, to-do lists, and documents, all conveniently located in the Contact Details section. Gain insights into the communication history between your company and each contact to enhance customer service. Additionally, add tasks, comments, notes, and events, and attach files to contacts for comprehensive management. Stay connected with your contacts through email, phone, FAX, and SMS with effortless ease.

Intelligent Marketing Automation

One of ConvergeHub’s standout features is its intelligent marketing automation capabilities. It empowers eCommerce businesses to craft tailored marketing campaigns that resonate with individual customer segments.Get a real-time snapshot of key metrics from ConvergeHub dashboard. Users can know about the latest developments in marketing and sales activities from four different panels – Deals By Expected Close Date, Leads By Source, Lead Acquisition and Deal Acquisition.

Whether it’s sending targeted product recommendations, personalized discounts, or exclusive offers, ConvergeHub’s automation tools ensure that the right message reaches the right audience at the right time, significantly boosting conversion rates.

eCommerce businesses can easily target different priority markets by running automated marketing campaigns. 

For example- Creating separate lists from targets, accounts, leads, and contacts and further link them to the campaigns. This way, it’s easier to reach out to a larger customer base at a time without even worrying about crafting tailored marketing messages for each of them. 

Simplified Sales Processes

ConvergeHub streamlines the entire sales process, from lead generation to conversion. Its intuitive interface enables sales teams to track leads, monitor sales pipelines, and forecast future sales trends. By providing real-time insights, ConvergeHub equips eCommerce businesses with the tools to make data-driven decisions, enhancing their sales strategies and, ultimately, their revenue.

Collaborate seamlessly using ConvergeHub’s Account Management module. Empower sales representatives, managers, and authorized personnel to access a comprehensive account history from a centralized repository. Create tasks, schedule events, and add comments and notes to accounts for efficient management. Communicate with accounts effortlessly via email, phone, FAX, and SMS. Attach files directly from your computer or ConvergeHub Library to enhance account documentation. Gain a deeper understanding of accounts by linking them to relevant leads, deals, and contacts. Explore past deals to identify buying patterns, analyze opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, and establish loyalty programs for strategic growth.

Exceptional Customer Support

For any business, customer support is non-negotiable. And that’s true in the eCommerce realm as well. ConvergeHub enhances customer support experiences by centralizing all customer inquiries and issues (as already mentioned). Its ticketing system ensures that no query goes unanswered, leading to improved customer satisfaction levels. Swift and efficient support not only resolves problems but also builds trust, fostering long-term customer relationships. In the  eCommerce domain, customer queries are everyday affairs. From return policies to product  queries, a CRM software for eCommerce helps support teams have a look at everything from a single location.  

Integration Capabilities

ConvergeHub understands the importance of a seamless workflow. Its integration capabilities allow eCommerce businesses to connect ConvergeHub with other essential tools and platforms. Whether it’s integrating with email marketing software, payment gateways, or social media platforms, ConvergeHub ensures that businesses have a cohesive ecosystem, optimizing their operations for maximum efficiency and profitability.

The predefined email campaign templates in ConvergeHub helps enhance your email marketing strategy with targeted content using our range of predefined email templates. 

Select from six distinct categories: My Templates, Business, Seasonal Holiday, Newsletter, Showcase, and Press Release to align your communication effectively. Additionally, tailor or craft dynamic email templates effortlessly using ConvergeHub’s Rich-Text HTML Editor to suit your specific needs.

Data-Driven Decision Making

In today’s data-driven landscape, ConvergeHub equips eCommerce enterprises with vital insights. Harnessing advanced analytics and reporting tools, businesses can gauge the impact of their marketing endeavors, monitor customer interactions, and spot emerging trends. Armed with this knowledge, eCommerce entities can make well-informed choices, fine-tune their approaches, and maintain a competitive edge in the dynamic eCommerce realm. With detailed metrics at their fingertips, businesses can adapt swiftly, ensuring they remain ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving digital marketplace. Ultimately, advanced analytics and reporting tools are invaluable assets for businesses looking to gain a competitive edge in the ever-evolving digital marketplace.

Here are the eCommerce brands that have garnered success using CRM Software

Amazon: The eCommerce giant utilizes CRM software to analyze customer behaviors, recommend products, and personalize user experiences. Through its robust CRM system, Amazon achieved a 29% increase in sales within a year.

Shopify: Shopify, a leading eCommerce platform, leverages CRM tools to empower its merchants. By providing in-depth customer insights, Shopify enables businesses to tailor their offerings, resulting in a significant 20% growth in customer retention rates.

Zappos: Zappos, an online shoe and clothing retailer, attributes its exceptional customer service to CRM implementation. By centralizing customer data and integrating it with their support system, Zappos achieved a remarkable 75% customer satisfaction rate, leading to increased repeat business.

Last but not the least

ConvergeHub is a highly customizable cloud CRM solution that brings tailored features to suit your industry-specific needs. It is not just a CRM software; it’s a strategic ally that propels eCommerce businesses toward unparalleled success. According to a study by Nucleus Research, businesses earn $8.71 for every dollar spent on CRM software. By unifying customer data, automating marketing efforts, optimizing sales processes, providing exceptional customer support, enabling seamless integrations, and facilitating data-driven decision-making, ConvergeHub empowers eCommerce ventures to not only meet customer expectations but exceed them, thereby securing their position as industry leaders. As eCommerce businesses continue to evolve, ConvergeHub stands as the cornerstone upon which their success stories are built.

Business Growth Ideas: How To Close Deals With Prospective Leads (You Do Not Like)

There are times when the personalities of some people do not mesh. Just like any other areas in our lives, this is even true in sales, in spite of the fact that people often stereotype sales reps of having a personality like social champions, nevertheless, if you work in sales and is seeking business growth it is important and critical that you must be able to deal with prospects and customers who have certain obtrusive personalities that might even clash with your own. Now as a salesperson you need not always have to be the best friend with a prospective customer to work together and find them a solution with your brand’s offerings.

There are times when the personalities of some people do not mesh.
Just like any other areas in our lives, this is even true in sales, in spite of the fact that people often stereotype sales reps of having a personality like social champions, nevertheless, if you work in sales and is seeking business growth it is important and critical that you must be able to deal with prospects and customers who have certain obtrusive personalities that might even clash with your own.

80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls after the meeting. 44% of sales reps give up after 1 follow-up. Click To Tweet

Now as a salesperson you need not always have to be the best friend with a prospective customer to work together and find them a solution with your brand’s offerings.

Therefore here are certain vital tips as to how you can close a deal with even an unfriendly prospect inside your CRM software platform’s database that you may not like:

Never Ever Try To Rush It

It is very natural that as a sales rep you can be obviously tempted to try to rush a deal in your sales pipeline so that you do not have to invest more time with a challenging prospect in your CRM database.

However, when you and your prospective lead are not quite comfortably remaining on the same page, it is important that you must lie low and take time to help build a sense of trust and understanding with the prospective buyer of your offerings.

This is because, in the end, it is no wonder that you both are in fact on the same side and so working together will help both to cherish the best outcome.

Swallow Your Pride

There are several times we have observed as a vendor of CRM software for small and medium businesses, that dislike for a prospective customer often stems from that person disregarding your opinion and advice.

This is because as a sales representative of an offering, it is most likely that you do understand a lot more about what you are suggesting, but then again, an individual who has never met you has no reason to consider you as an expert.
Therefore, there is bound to remain a bit of uncertainty until you establish your credibility and credentials to the person on the other side of the line and in B2B selling show them ways for business growth.

Hence, try to remain humble and acknowledge your prospect’s doubts since brushing their concerns and pain-points aside will only drive you both further away from the imminent sale.

Find Common Ground

No matter how poles apart you and your prospective customer may be, there are going to be for certain a few aspects that you have in common.

Therefore, take your time to tease out these common likings and disliking between you and your prospect, and your experience will be significantly more pleasant.

Make some small talks with your prospect, asking them about their interests and hobbies, and thereafter whatever you do never lie about being interested in what they are (even if it is illogical, or not true).
Since they are going to figure it out that you are not interested in their favorite Hip-Hop or R&B band pretty quickly if you fake it.

Focus On The Big Picture

Even if working in tandem with this customer is torture and you are deep inside the ‘5th circle of Hell’ try to focus on the big picture to calm down your fury.
Just remember once you hopefully close the deal you will never have to see the prospect you do not like anymore.

Hence, stay strong, remain composed, and think about the commission check that you will be receiving once you win the deal.

Pass It Off If Needed

Well, this is the last resort, so think twice before you take this step and even if you do it, never makes this a habit.

Now, if you and your prospective customer will really never see eye to eye, it is time that you might as well pass the deal (especially if the deal is not exceptionally large) to another member of your sales team.

In other words, pass the baton if working with this prospect is truly making you feel miserable, however, before that always remain sure that you have used all your other options first before deciding on this ultimate step and thereafter select another prospect that you might nurture from your easy to use CRM software solution’s database of prospective leads.

Conclusion

As a sales rep, you need to be able to get your work done for business growth even when you do not like some of your prospects.

Therefore in a gist, although making deals with prospects that you do not like may seem to be a frustrating act, however, by using a proactive customer relationship platform like sales CRM software whereby you can find a 360-degree view of your prospects and customers can decrease your sales cycle and make you close these hated deals successfully in lesser time.

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Customer Acquisition Or Retention – Which One Should Be Your Main Concern Today

Have you ever thought about which one is more important for your business: new customer acquisition or retention of the one that you already have? We all are aware of the fact, that acquiring new customers is one of the most important criteria for any business. However, this must also be remembered that retaining your present and old customers is also critically important if you are running a subscription-based business (like cloud based CRM software) or have repeat customers. Hence, we can see both acquiring fresh customers and retaining the existing ones are equally important for the growth of any company.

Have you ever thought about which one is more important for your business: new customer acquisition or retention of the one that you already have?

We all are aware of the fact, that acquiring new customers is one of the most important criteria for any business.

Acquiring new customers costs 5 times more than retaining their existing ones. Click To Tweet

However, this must also be remembered that retaining your present and old customers is also critically important if you are running a subscription-based business (like cloud based CRM software) or have repeat customers.

Hence, we can see both acquiring fresh customers and retaining the existing ones are equally important for the growth of any company.

Nevertheless, it is really a big question for many as to how do they know which one to focus more on customer acquisition or retention when forming the strategies needed to boost their business growth.

Now, the answer to this question is subjective, and highly complicated, as it involves several variables like your long-term business goals, customer acquisition cost, your business model, and so on.

Hence to answer this complex topic, whereby we need to consider several things, let us dig into the topic and shed some light, as to which is the right strategy for your company based on the business model you work on.

Basic of Customer Acquisition

So let us start with the obvious. It is no brainer that you just cannot run a successful business without winning fresh customers, which is particularly true for small businesses and startups.

Now, acquiring the first few customers does always seem to be a monumental up-hill task when you start your business. Since building your brand reputation can be most difficult without any customers.

Mostly the first customers for any business come from the existing contracts of the company and its stakeholders in the business. However, as your business evolves acquiring new customers becomes exponentially easier, since an increase in brand awareness helps in growing your customer base.

Nevertheless, how you approach your sales strategy for customer growth largely depends on your business goals.

Therefore, let us now look into how you can develop the right sales strategy for your business to find customer growth.

Potential Pitfalls of Customer Acquisition

Although it has been agreed that your business needs new customers and hence the sales pipeline in your best CRM software should never remain empty, nevertheless, several organizations make the blunder of devoting too many resources for customer acquisition and not enough staffs for retaining them, since they remain confused about understanding whether customer acquisition or retention which should supersede the other as their goal.

Therefore, customer churn is an obvious phenomenon that happens when you acquire a new customer but do not take the appropriate measures to ensure that your customer is happy using your offerings, which results in losing them quickly.

Therefore, the key to keeping your customers happy is to provide a world-class customer experience (CX) right from the very beginning after your sale that in turn boosts customer satisfaction and renewal rates.

According to a survey done by Invesp, acquiring fresh customers in most businesses costs 5 times more than retaining their existing ones.

Therefore, when you win over a fresh customer, there is your chance to solidify their trust in your businesses’ ability to support them successfully.

Never sign in a new customer and then leave them to fend for themselves on their own, for if you do this you will surely dissatisfy the customers, who will most likely leave your brand for competition.

Hence while you onboard a new customer, ensure that you also provide high-quality training to the customer to increase their customer satisfaction which will eventually make the customer stay for long with your brand.

The Basics Of Customer Retention

Retaining your existing customers is not always as difficult as it seems.
This often-overlooked factor in business which determines the success and failure of your brand can be easily done by delivering a world-class customer experience that you can do simply by delighting your customers.

Here are some basic tips as to how you can retain your customers for long:

  • Start out on the right foot by ensuring that your customers have everything they need, which must begin from their first day.
  • Distribute contents that can solve some of the common problems faced by your customer base, which will help in building trust and also aid in positioning you as an authority in your marketplace.
  • Reach out to your customers on a regular basis, to check out how things are going.
  • Keep your customers informed about your brand’s new developments (like info on new products, bug fixes, forward-looking plans, and more).
  • Create a customer advisory board to let your customers suggest you in the evolution process of your company.
  • Focus on resolving customer issues on the first attempt by creating a dedicated helpdesk group.

Now, this is only a partial list of many other things that you can do to keep your customers loyal and satisfied with your brand so that they stick around and provide recurring revenue for your business.

 Benefits Of Customer Retention: Not Pitfalls

To be truthful there is really no drawbacks focusing on customer retention, as there are a plethora of statistics that back this up which even hints at your business growth:

  • Long-term loyal and satisfied customers spend more than the new ones. – Business.com
  • 80% of key business revenue comes from 20% of existing customers those who are satisfied and happy. – Forbes
  • Just a 2% growth in customer retention decrease up to 10% overall cost of the company – Amazon

Food for thoughts:

Would you rather have 50 new customers each year that leaves after that year or just 15 customers that stick with you for a decade?

Well, the answer seems to be pretty obvious.

Talking about customer acquisition or retention, new customers eat up more resources and administration costs, and they also do not produce enough revenue for your company.

On the other hand, a loyal and happy existing customer who remains with your business over the long haul not only allows you to predict your businesses’ future revenue more accurately but also provides you the peace of your mind.

Conclusion

Therefore, the future of all successful businesses remains with maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction using the best small business CRM software if they are a growing startup. Since doing so naturally results in a higher level of customer retention and helps in creating brand advocates that ultimately can do wonders for your brand reputation management efforts.

According to a report published by Corporate Visions, more than 80% of businesses spend more than 70% on their marketing budgets for acquiring new customers and unfortunately even lesser than 30% on customer retention initiatives.

Therefore, to conclude on this topic it is recommended that as a modern business organization using Salesforce Alternative CRM software like ConvergeHub for managing the relationship with your customers you should at least spend 50% of your marketing budgets on strategies and processes for retaining your customers since it is one of the best tactics for ensuring long-term business growth.

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6 Reasons Your SMB Needs A Small And Medium Business CRM Software Tool

As a small and medium business, in order to prosper and grow you need to invest pragmatically in the areas that can provide the greatest dividends, that is the reason more and more SMBs are implementing small and medium business CRM tools for generating steady revenue growth. In fact, CRM software is a tool that not only helps businesses to stay organized and build superior relationships as a contact management software but it also pays back $8.71 against every single dollar spent on this tool. And that means a phenomenal 774 percent return on your investments. Hence choosing an automated cloud-based CRM software solution is just not a smart business practice, but a CRM for small and medium businesses can easily transform your operations by increasing sales through lead scoring and thereby helping your employees to understand and support the customers and create optimal workflow processes for your teams.

As a small and medium business, in order to prosper and grow you need to invest pragmatically in the areas that can provide the greatest dividends, that is the reason more and more SMBs are implementing small and medium business CRM tools for generating steady revenue growth.

CRM is considered as one of the most important aspects of business operations as it integrates sales, marketing, customer support, and customer feedback in one system - Super Office (2021) Click To Tweet

In fact, CRM software is a tool that not only helps businesses to stay organized and build superior relationships as a contact management software but it also pays back $8.71 against every single dollar spent on this tool. And that means a phenomenal 774 percent return on your investments.

Hence choosing an automated cloud-based CRM software solution is just not a smart business practice, but a CRM for small and medium businesses can easily transform your operations by increasing sales through lead scoring and thereby helping your employees to understand and support the customers and create optimal workflow processes for your teams.

Still, need further persuasions?

Do not worry, here are some of the other big reason why having a CRM software solution is a must for your small and medium business:

1. It Nurtures Leads and Increases Sales

Do you know that the most basic reason why small and medium businesses adopt a CRM for SMB is that this business growth technology helps to streamline and boost their revenue?

How?

Well, it all begins with lead nurturing and management of the lead after initial lead generation. Modern online CRM permits small businesses to capture more leads from their business websites, social media platforms, emails, etc., and then track those leads throughout the entire sales process.

With your small and medium business CRM stocked up and filled with new contacts, your sales reps can easily start nurturing prospective buyers in the sales pipeline with personalized and targeted campaigns until they are ready to purchase your brand’s offerings.

That means using a CRM your sales teams can not only prioritize the leads but also spend less time trying to persuade unqualified leads who are never going to pull the trigger by taking endless time for closing their deals.

Another big plus of purchasing a small and medium business CRM tool is that the software helps to deliver key insights so that you can make smarter decisions for your company in sales.

This is because a small business CRM software solution can promptly let you know which lead source drives most sales for your brand so that you can allocate more time and money where it is needed. Moreover, it is also a tool that can point out which sales reps in your team are stressed to hit their goals or shed light on what your long-term and short- term forecasts about sales look like so that new business growth ideas and strategies can be tested as per need.

Are you aware that late follow-ups are one of the main reasons for businesses losing customers or failing to convert prospective leads stored in their CRM database?

Now CRM solution helps the sales reps to provide their contacts with appropriate and automated follow-ups to turn present customers into long-term buyers of their brands easily.

2. It Helps You Understand Your Customers

You must be knowing that the best way you can serve your customers is by understanding exactly what they need. Rather say, you must understand your customer’s pain points even though it might seem like a monumental task to gather such information when you have thousands of customers in your database.

Now, this is exactly where CRM comes into play since it is a tool that can gather information about all your customers at a granular level and thereafter even analyze those data to gain valuable insights that might help your business to make more customer-centric and intelligent business decisions for your company.

CRM can track trends, identify opportunities, assess behaviors – all with a few clicks of a button.

Therefore small and medium business CRM tool is particularly useful for SMBs selling complex solutions or for startups with longer sales cycles.

This is because the constant data collection by the Enterprise CRM software allows your business to relentlessly perfect how you interact with each and every customer, since when months of customer-related data is effortlessly recorded and analyzed it allows businesses to understand the different decisions that guided the customers throughout their entire journey.

You can even use this information stored to improve your small businesses’ marketing strategies, tweak your email marketing campaigns, sales approaches, website designs until you can find the optimal way to reach your target audience in the marketplace.

Additionally, another way you can leverage the insight that you have gained through CRM is to create a more personalized experience for your customers.

This is because, when you have accurate oversight into the preferences and behaviors of your clientele, you can easily tailor messages or improve your offerings so that they align more closely with your customer’s expectations and needs, and thereby help develop more meaningful and deeper connections with your customers which can promote loyalty and increase chances of customer referrals for your brand.

3. It Improves Workflow

Irrespective of how small is your business, your marketing and sales processes will always have room for improvements.

Now, the reality here is that most businesses have a plethora of manual processes in their organization and use sticky notes and spreadsheets that kills productivity.

CRM software for small and medium business is a tool that can help to remove the bottlenecks and make it easy to create effective workflows you teams can stick to on a daily basis.

No matter if it is just automating flow-ups on new leads or delivering a reliable onboarding process for new customers, a CRM for SMB can boost your entire team’s efficiency right from lead generation, through sales to customer support – which leads me to my next point.

4. It Escalates Customer Support

Now providing world-class support is one of the strongest pillars for every small business and startup, which not only impacts the retention rate of their customers but also their revenue.

But how can you deliver a consistent world-class customer experience?

Well, you can easily do it by providing your support team’s instant access to detailed information about each and every customer.

Allow your support reps to discover your customer’s online history, their purchase and order information, and their past interactions with your company so that your support reps can truly understand what each customer has gone through.

Now a big advantage of CRM software is that it is a tool that can collect all customer data inside a single repository, which can make it easier to segment your customers based on their specific interests and needs.

5. It Maximizes Resources

We all know that most owners of small and medium businesses are too familiar with the challenge of wearing multiple hats.

In the present business landscape, even mid-sized companies struggle to make the most out of limited resources.

Now as technology does the heavy lifting marketing automation in a robust small business CRM allows a company of any size to do more with fewer resources in their payrolls.

Therefore using a small and medium business CRM tool even companies operating on a skeleton crew can provide high-level service and remain competitive with bigger businesses.

As it has been mentioned even earlier, CRM software can take care of the majority of repetitive admin tasks, keep records and make timely follow-ups with the contacts in the CRM software’s database, while providing you as an entrepreneur to run your business, attend conferences and meetings or provide demos to prospective customers that are ready to buy.

6. It Enables You to Develop Best Practices

Finally, the best CRM software for small and medium businesses can help SMBs to identify and implement best practices to make sure that every employee in their organization remains on the same page and that the business runs smoothly like a well-oiled machine.

Therefore CRM not only helps businesses to find ways to maximize their productivity but also aids in keeping costs down and makes SMBs operate profitably.

It helps in building best practices for making small businesses’ new employee onboarding processes easier, bring them up to speed faster, and provide new entrants with the appropriate information and tools they need to do their job effectively.

Conclusion

Hence with the best small and medium business CRM tool in place your SMB can not only drive more sales, but it can help to delight your customers and make your business more productive.

Therefore with everything, a CRM can do for your business, can you really afford not to have one for finding rapid sales and revenue growth?

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5 Lead Tracking Best Practices To Manage Your Sales Pipeline

Even if your business does not have written documentation of the details of how you move your leads through pipeline or funnel, you must be still following a series of steps for lead tracking the prospective customers that guide you from point A to point B in your sales process. Now in order to identify the weakest point of your present sales process, it is as simple as identifying the best and the worst things about your lead’s movement in the sales pipeline. This is because, even if you get tons of apparently profitable leads from a free lead generation tool, or by sharing free resources, but eventually lose half of them, it could be a sign that you need a better lead tracking solution and the best lead tracking practices that will help grow your business.

Even if your business does not have written documentation of the details of how you move your leads through pipeline or funnel, you must be still following a series of steps for lead tracking the prospective customers that guide you from point A to point B in your sales process.

Now in order to identify the weakest point of your present sales process, it is as simple as identifying the best and the worst things about your lead’s movement in the sales pipeline.

Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. - DemandGen Report Click To Tweet

This is because, even if you get tons of apparently profitable leads from a free lead generation tool, or by sharing free resources, but eventually lose half of them, it could be a sign that you need a better lead tracking solution and the best lead tracking practices that will help grow your business.

Hence irrespective of whether your businesses goals are to provide better service to your customers, or build better social media engagements, or just find more time on your hand, understanding your organization is the primary step to tracking sales leads which can be as easy as using a CRM software or setting up spreadsheets for finding sales growth.

BEST PRACTICES FOR IMPROVING SALES LEADS TRACKING SKILLS

1. Create an Email Sending Sequence

A big part of managing leads involves nurturing the leads. Therefore even before you send your first email to your prospective customers ensure that you have an entire sales cadence ready that you can send out sequentially over the course of weeks or months.

This is because as one of the leading vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools, we have observed that just one email and thereafter one follow-up are never enough to understand the effectiveness of your lead nurturing campaigns.

Hence businesses must use an email tracking tool like a CRM platform that can allow organizations to track and measure email opening rates, click-through rates, replies, and bounce rates of the emails, which are all important metrics in determining the efforts of your email marketing campaigns.

Therefore it is only with a structured email sequence, you can find a controlled variable to judge upon individual lead responses, which is an info that you can track to find the interested prospects and also those leads that require a bit more convincing.

2. Schedule Follow-Ups

We all know that not all the leads that enter the sales funnel will be at once ready to buy your offerings. Therefore it always requires some extra work to be done before finding successful conversions.

Hence it is important that businesses must invest in lead tracking, lead generation, and lead automation software solutions since by actually neglecting to nurture and talk to your leads, you will be eventually wasting a good deal of money that your business has spent on acquiring them in the first place.

Now you might think that tracking 20 potential customers through your sales pipeline is an easy job, but that changes when that number of leads up to the 100s.

This is because losing track of where your leads are in your sales pipeline (which ones are reading what content or which ones have received your proposals) can be detrimental to your sales process.

Therefore you should schedule your follow-ups to understand exactly where your prospects are in the sales pipeline, and what the next step should be so that you do not start overselling even before enough resources have been shared with the prospective customer, or you might forget them altogether and make them fall through the crack.

3. Follow a Lead Cycle That Makes Sense

While it is always beneficial to nurture and build relationships with long-term leads, instead of exclusively going for the relatively short-term ones. Lead cycles can go on for months and might even take more resources than it is worth.

Hence stick to a lead cycle that essentially makes sense with the model of your business, so that you can increase your profits.

This is important since which B2C leads tend to have a shorter cycle, like if you are an e-commerce site, a fortnight of nurturing campaign is sufficient, whereas for B2B leads the nurturing process can last as long as several months and with some lasting up to a whole year.

Therefore imposing a lead cycle for your business, will help to ensure that your sales reps do not keep engaging with the same prospects over and over again. Moreover shortening your lead cycle will also help to keep your sales pipeline fresh with new leads flowing into the funnel and ensure that your sales reps are pursuing new leads every day and thereby connecting with new opportunities on a regular basis.

4. Track the Sales Pipeline

Now while the sales funnel focuses on the stage-by-stage conversion of the leads, the sales pipeline reflects only what is on your plate at this very minute.

Therefore if you are just keeping track of your sales funnel using a sales CRM tool, consider integrating the sales pipeline also into your process.

This is because when you successfully track the leads through the sales pipeline, it becomes much more easier to remain cognizant of what each lead requires from your company.

Hence think of your sales pipeline stages as steps and formulate what actions are needed to be taken at each stage, since when you can organize leads this way and track them according to their placement in the sales pipeline, you can create a standardized process on how your sales reps should approach the leads.

This also makes your lead nurturing process simpler, whereby you can perform mass actions and create relationships with your leads as a group that can reduce your efforts, but you must do it without forgetting about personalization.

5. Practice Lead Scoring

Finally, you must practice lead scoring, which is a process of segregating leads that belong to the highest priority down to leads that of the least priority in the funnel.

Businesses can score their leads using a business CRM tool based on their urgency, project size, availability of resources, and more.

Therefore instead of treating all leads as the same and one, this practice helps to focus more resources, personalization, and efforts on leads that are more beneficial for your business.

Lead scoring also makes it easier for businesses to understand when it is the right time to weed out unresponsive leads from your sales pipeline when you are sifting through hundreds of leads and thousands of data points that need to be monitored every day.

In other words, lead scoring helps your teams to make decisions at a glance without even worrying about making uninformed decisions in their lead tracking endeavors for finding sales growth.

Conclusion

Now as you must have understood by now, that ultimately all these lead tracking practices can only be performed by a single business growth tool which is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, which is a platform that is dedicated to lead management and lead nurturing and can easily perform any of these tasks simultaneously without fail.

Additionally, an all in one CRM can also help businesses to understand the best performing sales reps in their teams as well as the movement of their leads along the pipeline, generate reports and make you see trends in your sales processes that can amplify your efforts to stay on top of new and ongoing leads for finding rapid revenue growth.

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5 Reasons To Choose A Cloud-Based Low-Cost CRM Software For Small Business And Startups

Although Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is really a buzzword in the present business space, and most look for low-cost CRM software for small business and startups since almost all know that they can significantly benefit from adopting a CRM for SMB tool – yet only a very few know which solution fits their business model effectively. Now it does not really matter if your company employs just 10 staff or has more than 100 employees- business CRM is a tool that can help you build closer connections with your prospective leads and customers, sell more, and provide professional customer service and thereby grow your business. Therefore, when it comes to buying an easy to use CRM, it must be affordable, it should not be complicated, should be accessible day and night, and should target your unique business needs.

Although Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is really a buzzword in the present business space, and most look for low-cost CRM software for small business and startups since almost all know that they can significantly benefit from adopting a CRM for SMB tool – yet only a very few know which solution fits their business model effectively.

64.2% of companies rate CRM tools as impactful or very impactful - LinkedIn Click To Tweet

Now it does not really matter if your company employs just 10 staff or has more than 100 employees- business CRM is a tool that can help you build closer connections with your prospective leads and customers, sell more, and provide professional customer service and thereby grow your business.

Therefore, when it comes to buying an easy to use CRM, it must be affordable, it should not be complicated, should be accessible day and night, and should target your unique business needs.

Now gone are those years when the term “CRM” bought to mind a picture of expensive and bulky software that needs an entire IT team and experts working solely on installation and maintenance of the software.

In fact, today’s modern all-in-one CRM systems are more user-friendly and technologically advance, but it even comes with a variety of business growth solutions that are designed to address the needs of all types of businesses, irrespective of whether they are big or small.

Therefore modern CRM solutions not only offer new possibilities, but they are easy to deploy and maintain, comes at a flexible cost.

This is because most CRM solutions nowadays have moved from their earth-bound domains all the way to the Cloud. And so if you are looking for a low-cost CRM software for small business and startups this is exactly in the Cloud where your business should look for a business CRM solution.

Hence if you are still not sure about cloud-based CRM solutions that are price-performance leaders in the CRM space, here are 5 solid reasons why CRM that are cloud-based is something that all businesses should consider seriously if they are looking forward to growing their business and find rapid sales growth:

  1. Hassle-Free Installation

The long innate fear that CRM comes with a complex installation procedure is no more a valid reason for not adopting a CRM for your business.

In fact, present-day cloud-based CRM tools are “IT hassle-free” and you can be up and running in no time, and all you need for that is an Internet connection, after which you can sign in online and use it.

Hence for using a modern easy to use CRM you not only do not have to pay for hardware, software maintenance, and servers you also do not need a permanent IT staff for data migration or even installing upgrades.

With cloud-based CRM all this is done by the CRM vendors remotely.

  1. Seamless Access

One of the greatest benefits of buying a CRM in the cloud is the round-the-clock accessibility of the software.

For example, imagine a situation whereby you need to make some game-changing and urgent sales call while you are on-the-go, or quickly find a contact’s phone no, or send a revised sales proposal, or an email when you are out of your workstation in the office, cloud CRM software can provide you access to the software from anywhere on any device be it a laptop, desktop, tablet or even a smartphone.

Again all you need for accessing the low-cost CRM software for small business is the Internet.

Hence using a cloud-based CRM you can always remain connected to the centralized CRM database as cloud CRM provides businesses the freedom and flexibility to what you need to do when you need to do it from anywhere.

  1. Affordable Product

Another important benefit of using this cloud-based business growth technology solution is that this business-enhancing solution certainly will never break your bank.

This is because if you are using a cloud-based Salesforce Alternative CRM tool you do not have to allocate a big sum of money for making a one-off purchase, but you can pay in regular installment which is usually preferred by SMBs.

Typically cloud CRM solutions operate on the pay-as-you-go subscription model that needs minimal upfront investments and so reduces the risk of going bust while using the software.

  1. High-Security Levels

Since the introduction of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) on May 25th, 2018, as information security levels at Cloud services are times higher than those provided by local IT firms, vendors that offer cloud-based CRM tools take security issues seriously.

Additionally, providers of cloud CRM solutions even offer advanced automatized back-up policies and have robust data-recovery plans if any breach happens while working with their software.

Moreover, most low-cost CRM software for small business also offers data safety to their customers by using two-step authentication and robust passwords.

  1. Enhanced Compatibility

Finally, as stand-alone business growth solutions have little chance of success in today’s IT world, so modern business environment requires information exchange between already available technology solutions which is paramount for all businesses.

Therefore, no one would invest in a software solution that cannot save your contacts, open your documents, or be able to integrate the email or accounting software that you are using for your business.

Hence compatibility with other products and services is the key to ensuring CRM’s effectiveness and longevity.

Now, CRM that uses cloud-based technology can be easily integrated with other software or applications, such as Gmail, QuickBooks CRM, Excel, Words, PowerPoint, Zapier, and many other tools.

In fact, it is this compatibility that makes cloud-based CRM an even more appropriate choice for your small business.

Conclusion

Now that you know what you need to look for in your low-cost CRM software for small business, the only thing that is left is to choose the CRM for small and medium business solutions’ vendor wisely.

Remember it has never been more important to improve workflow between your teams and provide full visibility of client communications between your employees than ever before.

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Lead Generation through CRM Software, ConvergeHub

Business is about people. They create the most important asset, leads, which is the life blood of your business. Managing leads effectively is, therefore, of utmost importance for any modern enterprise that want to thrive in this increasingly complex business environment.Contact manager system or CRM application is aimed at making the task of managing leads easy for sales executives by helping them streamline and automate their lead management process. CRM systems can be a great help in managing your leads and upgrading them throughout its life-cycle using effective deal management techniques. Unlike first generation CRM solutions

How to do Lead Generation through CRM Software? Business is about people. They create the most important asset, leads, which is the life blood of your business. Managing leads effectively is, therefore, of utmost importance for any modern enterprise that wants to thrive in this increasingly complex business environment. Contact manager system or CRM application is aimed at making the task of managing leads easy for sales executives by helping them streamline and automate their lead management process.

CRM systems can be a great help in managing your leads and upgrading them throughout its life-cycle using effective deal management techniques. Unlike first generation CRM solutions, which were more static and were merely a contact management tool, modern CRM tools are more sophisticated and intelligent. Apart from managing contacts, it can also facilitate tracking, managing and capturing leads and streamlining the sales process. A modern CRM system captures real-time data and keeps your team engaged through automatically shared updates.

ConvergeHub offers a cloud based CRM that is targeted to create a unified platform for businesses to integrate between sales, marketing and customer support. The CRM is designed to perform as a powerful sales tool that will assist in automating sales processes and help with improving sales volume through its smart lead capturing and lead nurturing techniques.

Generating a continuous stream of leads is the most challenging part of the job for any sales executive. New leads are hard to come by, therefore, you need to find new and improved ways to reach out to your potential customers. ConvergeHub has embedded advanced web to lead and social media lead capturing tools to its newly launched CRM application for small businesses.

Web to lead

ConvergeHub has integrated advanced web to lead functionality that directly captures leads from websites generated through web forms and updates the CRM. Converge CRM has taken the lead capturing functionality one step further by allowing business users to create personalized web forms to integrate to websites and blogs.

The ConvergeHub’s web form building platform is based on the simple drag and drop technique. The user is simply required to drag and drop important and desired fields to the space provided for web form building. The inbuilt form editor allows the user to further customize the form to best suit his requirements.

Grabbing leads from social media

Social media today is regarded as a powerful channel to promote two way communications. Over 90% of the US adult population use a social networking platform of some form or another for regular interactions. Merging social media with CRM has helped sales and marketing teams to explore the potential of identifying new markets, tracking new customers and generating more leads. The phase II of ConvergeHub will establish it as a complete social CRM tool helping the users receive real-time status updates of their customers on their CRM account and help in importing the contacts of the friends of their existing customers.

The powerful lead capturing intelligence offered by ConvergeHub will let you tap into the potential market exposed through friends of friends on social sites.